Hugo Award winners and statsporn!

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Last night I had the extreme pleasure of attending the Hugo Awards ceremony at the World Science Fiction Convention and of losing two Hugos to two of the nicest, most deserving people in science fiction: my friend and teacher Nancy Kress (Best Novella for "The Erdmann Nexus") and my friend and copyfight comrade Neil Gaiman (Best Novel for "The Graveyard Book"). Indeed, this may have been the strongest Hugo ballot in a decade. The pre-award reception was practically awash in awesomesauce, and the winners were, to a one, absolute mensches and geniuses.

I've pasted in the winners below, and thrown in a link to the Hugo Awards administrators' traditional infoporn dump of stats on who nominated and voted for what. My undying thanks to all of you who put Little Brother and True Names on the ballot. I've also thrown in the text of my undelivered Little Brother acceptance speech, because I can, and because it thanks a lot of people who deserve it.

Once I've got a fatter network pipe (this post is going out over the VIA Rail on-train WiFi), I'll upload my Hugo photos, which includes a shot of Neal Stephenson's undelivered acceptance speech for Anathem, which was translated into Ur by Jeremy Bornstein!

Best Novel: The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins; Bloomsbury UK)

This is one of the finest moments in my life, the fulfilment of a dream I've chased since I first put pen to paper and wrote a story, in 1977, when I was six years old. My friends know that I watch the Hugos like baseball fans watch the World Series, pounding my feet and shouting when the books and stories and writers and editors I love are recognized by the WorldCon members.

It's doubly rewarding that I receive this prize for Little Brother, a novel that is so near and dear to my heart, a novel that I tried to imbue with the hopes and fears of my comrades in the fight for technological freedom, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Free Software Foundation, ACLU, CIPPIC, and Open Rights Group to the thousands of hackers, librarians, activists, and dreamers whom I've had the fabulous privilege of working with over my career.

My sincere and everlasting thanks to my wife, Alice, who gracefully puts up with all the frustrations of living with a writer, even down to letting me get up at 5AM in our hotel room during our anniversary trip to Rome to finish this novel.

Also thanks to my editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and to the people at Tor from Tom Doherty to Dot Lin and Irene Gallo and Pablo Defendini who made this book the success it is.

Thanks to my literary agent Russell Galen and my foreign rights agents Danny and Heather Baror and my film agent Justin Manask for helping get this book into so many people.

And finally, thanks to all the readers, copyers and remixers who spread this book so quickly and so well all over the world. Without you, why bother with any of it?

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